Gateway Load Balancers - Elastic Load Balancing
Load balancer stateIP address typeLoad balancer attributesAvailability ZonesNetwork maximum transmission unit (MTU)Deletion protectionCross-zone load balancingAsymmetric flowsIdle timeout
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Gateway Load Balancers

Use a Gateway Load Balancer to deploy and manage a fleet of virtual appliances that support the GENEVE protocol.

A Gateway Load Balancer operates at the third layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It listens for all IP packets across all ports and forwards traffic to the target group that's specified in the listener rule, using the GENEVE protocol on port 6081.

You can add or remove targets from your load balancer as your needs change, without disrupting the overall flow of requests. Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as traffic to your application changes over time. Elastic Load Balancing can scale to the vast majority of workloads automatically.

Contents

Load balancer state

A Gateway Load Balancer can be in one of the following states:

provisioning

The Gateway Load Balancer is being set up.

active

The Gateway Load Balancer is fully set up and ready to route traffic.

failed

The Gateway Load Balancer could not be set up.

IP address type

You can set the types of IP addresses that the application servers can use to access your Gateway Load Balancers. The following are the supported IP address types:

  • ipv4 – Only IPv4 is supported.

  • dualstack – Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported.

Dualstack load balancer considerations

  • The virtual private cloud (VPC) and subnets that you specify for the load balancer must have associated IPv6 CIDR blocks.

  • The route tables for the subnets in the service consumer VPC must route IPv6 traffic, and the network ACLs for these subnets must allow IPv6 traffic.

  • A Gateway Load Balancer encapsulates both IPv4 and IPv6 client traffic with an IPv4 GENEVE header and sends it to the appliance. The appliance encapsulates both IPv4 and IPv6 client traffic with an IPv4 GENEVE header and sends it back to the Gateway Load Balancer.

You can set the IP address type when you create the load balancer. You can also update it at any time.

To update the IP address type using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. On the navigation pane, under LOAD BALANCING, choose Load Balancers.

  3. Select the load balancer.

  4. Choose Actions, Edit IP address type.

  5. For IP address type, choose ipv4 to support IPv4 addresses only or dualstack to support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

  6. Choose Save.

To update the IP address type using the Amazon CLI

Use the set-ip-address-type command.

Load balancer attributes

The following are the load balancer attributes for Gateway Load Balancers:

deletion_protection.enabled

Indicates whether deletion protection is enabled. The default is false.

load_balancing.cross_zone.enabled

Indicates whether cross-zone load balancing is enabled. The default is false.

Availability Zones

When you create a Gateway Load Balancer, you enable one or more Availability Zones, and specify the subnet that corresponds to each zone. When you enable multiple Availability Zones, it ensures that the load balancer can continue to route traffic even if an Availability Zone becomes unavailable. The subnets that you specify must each have at least 8 available IP addresses. Subnets cannot be removed after the load balancer is created. To remove a subnet, you must create a new load balancer.

Network maximum transmission unit (MTU)

The maximum transmission unit (MTU) is the size of the largest data packet that can be transmitted through the network. The Gateway Load Balancer interface MTU supports packets up to 8,500 bytes. Packets with a size larger than 8500 bytes that arrive at the Gateway Load Balancer interface are dropped.

A Gateway Load Balancer encapsulates IP traffic with a GENEVE header and forwards it to the appliance. The GENEVE encapsulation process adds 64 bytes to the original packet. Therefore, to support packets up to 8,500 bytes, ensure that the MTU setting of your appliance supports packets of at least 8,564 bytes.

Gateway Load Balancers do not support IP fragmentation. Additionally, Gateway Load Balancers do not generate ICMP message "Destination Unreachable: fragmentation needed and DF set". Due to this, Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) is not supported.

Deletion protection

To prevent your Gateway Load Balancer from being deleted accidentally, you can enable deletion protection. By default, deletion protection is disabled.

If you enable deletion protection for your Gateway Load Balancer, you must disable it before you can delete the Gateway Load Balancer.

To enable deletion protection using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, under LOAD BALANCING, choose Load Balancers.

  3. Select the Gateway Load Balancer.

  4. Choose Actions, Edit attributes.

  5. On the Edit load balancer attributes page, select Enable for Delete Protection, and then choose Save.

To disable deletion protection using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, under LOAD BALANCING, choose Load Balancers.

  3. Select the Gateway Load Balancer.

  4. Choose Actions, Edit attributes.

  5. On the Edit load balancer attributes page, clear Enable for Delete Protection, and then choose Save.

To enable or disable deletion protection using the Amazon CLI

Use the modify-load-balancer-attributes command with the deletion_protection.enabled attribute.

Cross-zone load balancing

By default, each load balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in its Availability Zone only. If you enable cross-zone load balancing, each Gateway Load Balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in all enabled Availability Zones. For more information, see Cross-zone load balancing in the Elastic Load Balancing User Guide.

To enable cross-zone load balancing using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, under LOAD BALANCING, choose Load Balancers.

  3. Select the Gateway Load Balancer.

  4. Choose Actions, Edit attributes.

  5. On the Edit load balancer attributes page, select Enable for Cross-Zone Load Balancing, and then choose Save.

To enable cross-zone load balancing using the Amazon CLI

Use the modify-load-balancer-attributes command with the load_balancing.cross_zone.enabled attribute.

Asymmetric flows

Gateway Load Balancers support asymmetric flows when the load balancer processes the initial flow packet and the response flow packet is not routed through the load balancer. Asymmetric routing is not recommended, because it can result in reduced network performance. Gateway Load Balancers do not support asymmetric flows when the load balancer does not process the initial flow packet but the response flow packet is routed through the load balancer.

Idle timeout

Gateway Load Balancers support idle timeout for both TCP, and non-TCP flows.

  • For TCP flows, the idle timeout is 350 seconds.

  • For non-TCP flows, the idle timeout is 120 seconds.

Note: The idle timeout values for Gateway Load Balancers are static and cannot be changed.